The All Seeing Eye

The other day, my college age son quietly went around the house and put electricians tape over the camera lenses on the displays of all our home computers. I laughed when I discovered what he had done. . .then paused: after all, it wouldn’t be that hard for someone to remotely turn that camera on and secretly watch me and my family. I left the tape on.

This is what it has come to. The revelations of recent days about the NSA being able to spy on the phone calls of millions of everyday Americans, without warrant, in search of a few possible terrorists has made everyone just a little more paranoid – and a little less trusting of the benign nature of our Federal government. The reality is that we may not yet be paranoid enough.

I come from a spook family. I was born in Munich while my father was running counter-intelligence missions for the Air Force OSI into Eastern Europe; and by the time I was a teenager in Silicon Valley he was working in security at NASA. Being in such a family gave one unique insights into the hidden workings of the world.